The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices.
As enterprises develop their information technology (IT) strategy, and as technologies evolve to enable location of services in a multi-data center configuration, there is a need for inter-data center and inter-cloud provisioning capabilities. However, challenges exist with respect to making inter-system data and policy-driven decisions to take provisioning actions.